Nick Hanauer, who may be the nation’s only venture capitalist who fully understands just how much havoc American capitalism since the 1970s has wreaked with all but our wealthiest citizens, and who’s put forth some of the most far-sighted remedies to spread the wealth Americans create to the hundred-plus millions who actually create it, is at it again. Yesterday, our friends at Democracy posted a new article by Hanauer that proposes a range of policies that would hold large employers to higher labor standards than the higher universal labor standards that Hanauer has proposed in previous articles in both Democracy and the Prospect.

In earlier articles he wrote with labor leader David Rolf, Hanauer called for establishing a “shared security system” under which employers would be required to provide workers with portable, pro-rated and universal benefits, whether those workers were direct employees, sub-contracted employees, part-timers or independent contractors, based on the amount of time the workers put in for the employer. Those employers, whatever the status of their workers, would also be required to meet wage and benefit standards.

In his new article, Hanauer addresses the issues of the increasing economic concentration to which the growth of monopolies and monopsonies has subjected workers and consumers, and the increasing geographic concentration of investment which has devastated many American communities. “America is suffering from interconnected crises of risinging market concentration and rising economic inequality,” he writes. The solution he proposes in his new article is to hold “dominant employers to progressively higher labor standards than their smaller, more fragile and weaker competitors.” Large companies—those with more than 500 employees—now account for 52.5 percent of U.S. employment up from 45.5 percent in 1988, he points out, and companies with the buying power of Walmart can and do insist that the companies that supply it with the goods it puts on its shelves cut expenses—that is, their employees’ wages—to the bone. Hanauer’s solution is to required scaling wages, benefits and standards higher for companies whose size or market impact are large.

The Hanauer solution comes in two versions: the simple and the complex. In the simple, the only metric determining standards is number of employees—so that, for instance, a company with fewer than 500 employees might be required to pay at least $15 an hour, a company with between 500 and 5000 would be required to pay $17, and a company with more than 5000 would be required to pay $22. As the larger employers do more hiring in their areas than the smaller ones, the threat of workers moving to larger employers might raise wage standards at smaller companies seeking to retain their workers.

The complex version more directly addresses a host of ailments to which our economy is prey. It could require higher standards on companies, for instance, that have a high ratio of CEO pay to median worker pay (a favorite cause of mine), or a high ratio of profits to labor costs, or that pay so poorly that its workers are compelled to be on Medicaid, or receive the Earned Income Tax Credit, or rely on food stamps to feed their families. More ambitiously still, it could required higher standards of companies that extract more income from regions than they provide—say, having a low-wage workforce in one area, while rewarding distant shareholders and executives with outsized profits. Walmart, Hanauer points out, takes the profit from its stores and showers it on shareholders, the children of Sam Walton first and foremost. A locally owned store in the same town as a Walmart spends its proceeds locally—and so while it must meet Hanauer’s universal labor standards, the standards on Walmart should be higher. Such a system, Hanauer readily acknowledges, would be more difficult to devise than one based simply on company size, but it could more directly address such problems as growing economic inequality, the gutting of many local economies, and even the increasing dearth of start-ups in the face of dominant monopolies.

Hanauer doesn’t counterpose his proposals to others that also seek to remedy our towering inequality, the growth of monopolies, and the flight of capital from non-metropolitan America. Rather, he means his ideas to complement and supplement initiatives such as those that would raise the minimum wage across the board, enable more workers to join unions, and direct more investment to rural and small-town economic deserts. My reaction to his suggestions is that they should be part of the broad progressive initiatives that the left and center-left are now formulating. The infrastructure and “Green New Deal” policies that progressives develop in the coming months and years will surely seek to remedy some of the regional underdevelopment problems that plague us, and Hanauer’s proposal for requiring higher standards on companies that, like Walmart, extract more wealth from communities than they provide, could well become a part—but only a part—of the solution.

As to setting higher standards for larger companies, or companies whose practices foster one or another form of inequality, we already have a version of such standards for banks. Responding to the crash of 2008, the Federal Reserve has set higher standards for “systemically important” financial institutions, requiring the mega-banks to keep more capital on hand than smaller banks, so they won’t tank the economy by running out of funds in the next financial panic.

Hanauer’s proposals are not a panacea, nor does he claim that they are. But viewed as part of a broad set of public policies to raise workers’ incomes and benefits and create the kind of “middle-out” economy that Hanauer has long called for (in part by inspiring and supporting the Prospect’s ongoing evisceration of trickle-down economics), my reaction is, “what’s not to like?” Hanauer has opened a new front in the battle to rebuild a mass middle class in America, for which he deserves our thanks.

]]>http://diyigou365.com/2018/12/14/how-to-compel-big-employers-to-be-better-employers/feed/0Republicans Who Slap Voters in the Face May Be in for a Nasty Surprisehttp://diyigou365.com/2018/12/13/republicans-who-slap-voters-in-the-face-may-be-in-for-a-nasty-surprise/
http://diyigou365.com/2018/12/13/republicans-who-slap-voters-in-the-face-may-be-in-for-a-nasty-surprise/#respondThu, 13 Dec 2018 13:31:54 +0000http://diyigou365.com/2018/12/13/republicans-who-slap-voters-in-the-face-may-be-in-for-a-nasty-surprise/John Hart/Wisconsin State Jour Continue Reading

Republicans in Michigan and Wisconsin who have moved aggressively to steamroll voters and strip power from incoming Democratic officials appear confident that they will pay no political price, and many analysts seem to concur.

After all, state legislators won’t face re-election for another two to four years, and electoral maps gerrymandered to heavily favor Republicans won’t be redrawn until after 2020. That’s a long time in politics, and it would be easy to assume that protesters now crowding the state capitals in Lansing and Madison will by then have moved on.

But that assumption overlooks two powerful lessons from the recent midterms: One, that gerrymandering can backfire, particularly when the political winds shift dramatically. And two, that voters are increasingly fed up with assaults on democracy. The more Republicans take aim at voting rights, judicial independence, campaign-finance disclosure, and popularly-approved ballot initiatives, the bigger the anti-GOP backlash promises to be. The fallout could hit not just state houses but also Capitol Hill, where Democrats just regained the House with 40 seats thanks in part to a popular anti-corruption message.

The recent power grabs in Michigan and Wisconsin mimic earlier, similar moves in North Carolina, and echo President Donald Trump’s anti-democratic instincts at home and abroad. They are also part of a much broader GOP movement to create what Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have called “laboratories of autocracy” in the states. From packing the courts to purging the voter rolls and penalizing public protests, Republicans have not been shy about rigging the rules.

But the recent Midwest maneuvers have been particularly blatant, involving 11th-hour lame-duck legislation to undermine both incoming Democratic governors and popular ballot measures. In Michigan, pending legislation would strip power from incoming Governor Gretchen Whitmer and other Democratic officials. It would also authorize GOP legislators to intervene in court cases, weaken campaign-finance enforcement, and water down several ballot measures, including one that put redistricting in the hands of an independent commission.

“To use legislative tricks to avoid the will of the people is just wrong,” says Rebekah Warren, a Democratic Michigan state senator who says she’s receiving hundreds of phone calls and more than 1,000 emails a day from incredulous constituents. “It’s just not what I believe our representative system is supposed to be. I worry about the long-term health of our institution.”

In Wisconsin, GOP lawmakers have moved to curtail the authority of incoming Democratic Governor Tony Evers, seize control of a controversial economic development agency, and limit early voting, which tends to favor Democrats. GOP Governor Scott Walker has dismissed the uproar as “hype and hysteria” driven mostly by “fundraising for political purposes.” But Evers may file suit if Walker signs the bills into law. GOP Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, who has a reputation for political independence, has been noncommittal about whether he will sign lame-duck legislation.

Republicans in both states may weather the storm, thanks to the GOP’s sophisticated gerrymandering in 2010. But the recent midterms demonstrated both the advantages and the limits of gerrymandering for the GOP. Republicans who spread their voters over as many districts as possible can end up with support that is broad but not deep, leaving them vulnerable to anti-incumbent fervor, notes Michael Li, senior counsel for the democracy program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.

Since GOP-drawn maps took effect in 2011, the party has lurched to the right, from “faint dog whistles” to “wholesale nationalism,” Li notes. “These districts are not designed in many cases to elect the Republicans of today, and if they continue to engage in behavior that subverts democratic norms, they may be in for a shock.”

In the recent midterms, several Democrats won in strongly GOP districts gerrymandered for Republicans, including the Eighth and 11th Districts of Michigan, the First District of South Carolina, the Fifth District of Oklahoma, and the Seventh and 32nd Districts of Texas. House Democrats in part credit their anti-corruption platform, and have pledged to approve HR 1, a reform package built on voting rights, campaign finance, redistricting, and ethics changes, as their first order of business in January.

“It’s folks from across the political spectrum who are demanding this,” said Maryland Democrat John Sarbanes, who chairs the House’s Democracy Reform Task Force, at a Capitol Hill press conference last month. “It’s not just Democrats. It’s independents, it’s Republicans.”

Ballot initiatives to end gerrymandering and place redistricting into the hands of independent commissions also won overwhelming bipartisan support in Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Utah this year. Of course, GOP Michigan lawmakers are already pushing back—just as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, can be counted on to scuttle any democracy overhaul that passes the House.

But once-arcane topics like campaign financing and gerrymandering are starting to resonate with voters, who in one recent poll ranked “corruption in Washington” as the “most important” issue for candidates to address. Some argue that the backlash against GOP power grabs may play out on the national stage, as the fight for political advantage in crucial Midwestern states stretches into 2020. By then, GOP state legislators may wish they hadn’t been quite so quick to slap voters in the face.

Young people like and want unions. Both the Gallup and the Pew polls released this summer show public support for unions at its highest levels in many years, and in both polls, it’s the young who give unions their highest approval ratings. In Pew, 68 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 had a favorable view of unions; in Gallup, 65 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 approved of them.

But given the risks of being fired that most young workers (like all workers) face if they attempt to unionize (and given the failure of the much-weakened National Labor Relations Act to protect them), few young workers have a realistic opportunity to form or join unions. The exceptions to this rule are increasingly found in newsrooms and on university campuses, where highly skilled workers are not easy to replace. Journalists and graduate student teaching and research assistants have been unionizing in droves over the past couple of years. Just yesterday, the staff of New York magazine voted to unionize with the NewsGuild of the Communications Workers of America.

Even at some of the most liberal publications and colleges, however, the young unionists often find that management exhibits a hostility to unions worthy of the Koch brothers. Earlier this week, writers and editors at the recently unionized Slate voted by a 52-to-1 margin to authorize a strike. In their efforts to bargain their first contract with management, they’ve come up against an unexpected wall. As Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg’s terrific labor-beat reporter, has chronicled, the company is insisting on making union dues optional—in essence, implementing the very same “right-to-work” policy that Slate writers denounced when the five Republican justices on the Supreme Court mandated it for all public sector employees. How management—which is the Graham Company, formerly the owner of The Washington Post—thinks it can credibly force through a policy that runs directly counter to Slate’s specific positions and overall political orientation is anyone’s guess. “We just felt that it’s a total and absolute betrayal of Slate’smost fundamental values,” Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern told Bloomberg.

There are plenty of Graham equivalents, alas, at the helms of colleges and universities. Over the past couple of decades, the National Labor Relations Board has gone back and forth on the question of whether students employed by their colleges can unionize. Not surprisingly, the Board has said yes when it has had a majority of Democratic-appointed members, and no when it has had a majority of Republican appointees. The Obama-appointed board said yes, and the Trump board has yet to revisit that decision.

Grad student organizing has also been sweeping the Ivies of late, and a number of those institutions have agreed to bargain with the unions their students had voted to join. Until recently, my own alma mater, Columbia, had refused, appearing to wait for a decision from the Trumpniks on the NLRB that denied students their right to bargain. But a few weeks ago, perhaps sensing that its stubborn opposition had won it few friends either on campus or across the Upper West Side, and that its teaching assistants were prepared to strike during final exams week, the administration reversed field and agreed to come to the table.

Now, however, another storied liberal college, Grinnell, in Iowa, has appealed to the NLRB a ruling from the board’s Minneapolis region that required the college to bargain with its student employees, who’d voted overwhelmingly to form a union. Columbia having taken a pass, it’s now Grinnell that seeks to inflict Republicans’ denial of democratic rights to workers.

What we’re seeing at some media institutions and otherwise august institutions of higher learning is a political, cultural, and generational clash. Media boards of directors and university boards of trustees are disproportionately populated by older, wealthy social liberals who seldom have given much thought to workers’ rights, or who have thought about it and haven’t liked the idea. Now, they’re up against a millennial generation economically battered by the Great Recession and that correctly believes that only through collective action can they win what’s rightfully theirs.

Over the past few days, we’ve even seen a version of this in Congress, where the redoubtable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called out her elders (which term describes every single member of both the outgoing and income Congress) for either underpaying their interns or not paying them at all.

This is one woke generation, Senator Schumer, Chairman Graham, and Distinguished Grinnell Trustees. Deal with them over the bargaining table, and pay them what they’re worth.

Last week, General Motors announced it would cut about 14,000 jobs, most of them in the politically vital swing states of Michigan and Ohio.

This doesn’t quite square with the giant $1.5 trillion tax cut Trump and the Republicans in Congress enacted last December, whose official rationale was to help big corporations make more investments in America and thereby create more jobs. Trump told Ohio residents “don’t sell your homes,” because lost automaking jobs “are all coming back.”

GM got a nice windfall from the tax cut. The company has already saved more than $150 million this year. But some of those Ohio residents probably should have sold their homes.

Trump is (or is trying to appear) furious, tweeting up a storm of threats against GM, including taking away its federal subsidies.

In reality, GM gets very few direct subsidies. Prior to the tax cut, the biggest gift GM got from the government was a bailout in 2009 of more than $50 billion.

But neither last year’s tax cut nor the 2009 bailout required GM to create or preserve jobs in America. Both government handouts simply assumed that, as former GM CEO Charles Erwin “Engine” Wilson put it when he was nominated as secretary of defense by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”

Yet much has changed since 1953. Then, GM was the largest employer in America and had only a few operations around the rest of the world. Now, GM is a global corporation that makes and sells just about everywhere.

Moreover, in the 1950s a third of America’s workforce was unionized, and GM was as accountable to the United Auto Workers as it was to GM’s shareholders. That’s why, in the 1950s, GM’s typical worker received $35 an hour (in today’s dollars).

Today, GM’s typical American worker earns a fraction of that. The bargaining clout of the United Auto Workers has been weakened not only by automation but also by the ease with which GM can get cheaper labor abroad.

In 2010, when GM emerged from the bailout and went public again, it even boasted to Wall Street that it was making 43 percent of its cars in places where labor cost less than $15 an hour, while in North America it could now pay “lower-tiered” wages and benefits for new employees.

So this year, when the costs of producing many of its cars in Ohio and Detroit got too high (due in part to Trump’s tariffs on foreign steel) GM simply decided to shift more production to Mexico in order to boost profits.

In light of GM’s decision, Trump is also demanding that GM close one of its plants in China.

But this raises a second reality of shareholder-first global capitalism that’s apparently been lost on Trump: GM doesn’t make many cars in China for export to the United States. Almost all of the cars it makes in China are for sale there.

In fact, GM is now making and selling more cars in China than it does in the United States. “China is playing a key role in the company’s strategy,” says GM CEO Mary Barra.

Even as Trump has escalated his trade war with China, GM has invested in state-of-the-art electrification, autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing technologies there.

Which brings us to a third fallacy behind Trump’s “America first” economic nationalism. Trump accuses China of stealing technology from American businesses. But big American corporations like GM are eager to invest in China regardless.

In shareholder-first global capitalism, technology doesn’t belong to any nation. It goes wherever the profits are.

“Making America great again” has nothing to do with making American corporations great again. Big American-based corporations are doing wonderfully well, as are their shareholders.

The real challenge is to make American workers great again. They don’t just need any job. They need good jobs, akin to those that GM’s unionized workers had a half-century ago. Most Americans haven’t had a raise in decades, considering inflation.

The difference between China and America is that big Chinese companies are either state-owned or dependent on capital from government-run financial institutions. This means they exist to advance China’s national interests, including more and better jobs for the Chinese people.

American corporations exist to advance the interests of their shareholders, who aren’t prepared to sacrifice profits for more and better jobs for Americans.

If Trump were serious about his aims, he’d try to reduce the chokehold of Wall Street investors on American corporations while strengthening the hand of American labor unions.

In a sentencing memo explaining why they believe Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen should get substantial jail time, federal prosecutors contended on Friday that the president of the United States directed a scheme to violate election laws by making large unreported payments to buy the silence of two women who say they had affairs with him. Meanwhile, special counsel Robert Mueller argued for leniency, hinting at more revelations to come regarding Russia: “Cohen provided the [special counsel’s office] with useful information concerning certain discrete Russia-related matters core to its investigation that he obtained by virtue of his regular contact with [Trump Organization] executives during the campaign,” Mueller wrote.

As extraordinary as it is to hear prosecutors make this accusation in an official document, you might not have greeted them with the shock they deserve, since we’ve know about the story in broad terms for a while. But it was inevitable that we’d wind up here, with Trump in a deepening scandal, hounded by the law, and desperately claiming his own innocence while begging his supporters to close their eyes to the truth.

Really: Could anything different have happened?

Each presidential administration has its own set of scandals. At one end you have something like the Nixon administration, with a criminal conspiracy involving dozens of officials and the direct involvement of the president; at the other end you have an administration like Barack Obama’s, with only the most minor molehills the opposition party unsuccessfully attempted to turn into mountains, none of which ever got anywhere near a president whose own behavior seemed without ethical blemish.

And then there’s Trump. Even before we began to understand the breadth of the Russia scandal, the payoffs to models, or the business shenanigans, we knew, or at least should have known, that there was simply no way he’d get through a term in office without being caught up in a scandal to rival Watergate or Iran-Contra.

It isn’t simply that on a personal basis Trump is so deeply corrupt, though that may have been a necessary condition. It continues to amaze that someone who spent a lifetime skating away from the law, stiffing creditors, and running scams like Trump University could actually be elected to the highest post in the land. His corruption is so profound that two months ago The New York Times published an extraordinary exposé documenting that Trump and his family engaged in a years-long scheme to defraud the U.S. government of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, and it was news for about a day and a half. When we learn that the great opponent of illegal immigration is himself employing undocumented immigrants at his properties, it barely makes a blip in the news because precisely no one is surprised.

In some alternate universe, at some point in 2015 Trump would have said to himself, “OK, I’m running for president now—I’ve got to clean up my act and make sure I only have ethical people around me.” That isn’t what he did, of course, for two reasons. First, he seems to be attracted to grifters, scammers, and con artists, people who don’t care where the ethical lines are and agree with him that if you cooperate with the authorities you’re a dirty snitch. Second, those are precisely the kind of people who are attracted to him. You weren’t going to find too many upstanding citizens in the pile of résumés at Trump Tower.

And to repeat, we saw this before he got elected. For instance, most presidential candidates trumpet endorsements from retired generals and admirals, but Trump could find precious few who would publicly support him. The one who did? Michael Flynn, someone with a long resume but a crackpot’s temperament, given to insane conspiracy theorizing and, as it turned out, some flexible ideas about obeying the law. It isn’t just the crime to which Flynn pleaded guilty (lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials) but things like the fact that he was working for the Trump campaign while secretly on the payroll of a foreign country (Turkey) that made him such a good match for Trump.

We could have known something fishy was up when Trump chose as his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, long known in Washington as probably the most ethically challenged member of the lobbyist profession (no small feat), legendary for representing some of the world’s worst dictators and, as it turned out, guilty of an astonishingly long list of crimes.

Then there’s Trump’s “personal lawyer” and factotum Michael Cohen, who wound up facing the prospect of years behind bars as soon as prosecutors started examining his business affairs, including his work for the Trump organization. Perhaps you might have had to be insightful to have watched one of Cohen’s 2016 TV appearances advocating for Trump and said, “Before this is all over, that guy is definitely going to wind up in jail.” But not that insightful. He reeked of it.

It was obvious that none of the people around Trump were the top-notch, platinum quality personnel he claimed to hire; instead, it was as though he sought to gather around him the worst people he could find.

Which may have been exactly what was necessary to do business, both commercial and political, the way he wanted. If you were a person of the highest ethical standards, you wouldn’t last a week in Trump’s employ before quitting in disgust, and very possibly calling the authorities to report what you’d seen or been asked to participate in. Trump needs people of low character, or at the very least people with a tolerance for transgressions being committed around them.

Maybe what happened in 2016 was that Trump’s most dramatic personality flaws—his repulsive misogyny, his appalling ignorance, his naked bigotry—distracted us from how corrupt he was, so that when we imagined him as president we thought he’d abuse women, target minorities, bumble around incompetently, and generally act like a boorish halfwit, but we didn’t quite consider the certainty of scandal.

We don’t even know the full extent of it; Robert Mueller obviously has many more cards to play. But if it wasn’t Russia, it would have been something else. With Donald Trump as president, a historic scandal was always inevitable.

President Donald Trump walks across the South Lawn as he arrives at the White House.

In the United States, as in muchoftheworld,democracyisinperil. Regarding the state of the American republic, one need only glance at the Twitter feed of President Donald J. Trump to see how. And if that doesn’t convince, just have a look at what’s going on in the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, where Republican lawmakers have convened extraordinary lame-duck sessions to clip the wings of incoming Democratic governors and executive branch leaders just ahead of their inaugurations. (More on this from my colleague, Paul Waldman, here.)

Going into this week, there was little doubt that today would be a tough day for the president, what with James Comey, the former FBI director fired from that position by Trump, testifying on the Hill, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller expected to drop sentencing memos destined to shed light on aspects of his investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and any involvement by the Trump campaign. So the torrent of tweets from a clearly unhinged Trump was perhaps to be expected.

The early morning Trump dump offered a mélange of unfounded allegations against members of the Mueller team, assertions made on Fox Business Channel by Jerome Corsi (a conspiracy-monger who is a target of the probe), and a leading question posed by the FBC host about the procedure used in a FISA request regarding a private investigation of Trump’s links to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. It all kicked off last night with a tweet that said this: “FAKE NEWS – THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.”

Around the same time that Trump’s “FAKE NEWS” tweet posted, CNN received a bomb threat that was later determined to be a hoax.

It is easy to point to Trump’s Twitter feed and laugh: Ha-ha-ha, the guy is nuts, stupid, can’t spell. And so we do, and then we go about our holiday shopping. But each tweet brings democracy writ large—not just ours—closer to the brink of disintegration.

When Trump asserts in a tweet, as he did this morning, that the Mueller investigation is a “Witch Hunt!” he undermines respect for the rule of law. He knows it. That’s what he wants.

And when the president rails against “FAKE NEWS” and CNN andThe New York Times and whichever major news outlet today publishes a negative story about him, he not only undermines belief in fundamental facts and a shared national narrative; he sets members of the media in the sights of violent radicals who hate to see their worldview threatened by the truth. But even more than that, he gives a wink to the Saudi crown prince who reportedly presided over the murderof a Washington Post columnist, or to Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’s dictatorial president, who has clamped down on media in his own country.

Yes, yes, that’s who he is, we say. And then we settle into the hard work of figuring out what to make for dinner.

But here’s what we do know about Donald Trump: He is already acting in contradiction to the U.S. Constitution. Just look at his directive on asylum-seekers, which refuses to consider the applications of anyone who has entered the country through anything other than designated ports of entry. But U.S. law says anyone who presents themselves within U.S. borders with a request for asylum shall be considered. If Trump is willing to flout the Constitution on this matter, how else might he do so? By jailing journalists? Or doing clandestine deals with hostile foreign powers? Or selling access to his staff?

Dammit, I don’t know! Bridge club tonight.

For many of us fortunate to enjoy a certain level of class- and skin-privilege, denial is a seductive response to all of the Trumpian horrors. Our lives, so far, have continued to go on much as they had before Trump: the same job, the same Sunday brunch with friends, the same parent-teacher conferences. At our present moment of peril, however, denial is a privilege—one unlikely to pay off well in the long term.

Look around. The world is falling prey to the forces of authoritarianism, most of it right-wing. The notion that it can’t happen here only adds fuel to the possibility that it very well could happen here. But the fact that we’re all at our desks or in our cars or at the meeting—and not in the streets—demonstrates just how invested we are in our own myth of American exceptionalism.

With a president who believes himself to be above the law, and above the very U.S. Constitution, we are, in our passivity, leaving open the possibility that the military will ultimately be left to determine the fate of the republic. Will the generals unilaterally reject an unconstitutional order, should another one be issued?

Jeez, pretty unlikely it’ll come to that, right? Now, where did I leave that grocery list?

A man and his daughter walk past a mural in Harvey, Illinois, outside Chicago.

It’s no revelation that Americans are living in a time of extreme divisiveness in our national politics. One party controls most of the government, and yet action out of Washington is slow to be seen, much less felt, by the American people. At these times of intense polarization among federal leaders the adage “all politics is local” comes into sharp relief.

While what’s happening in Congress or the White House can feel a million miles away, voters are concerned with what’s going on in their states, their cities, their communities, their neighborhoods. A wide swath of the American public sees the same thing: The costs of living and housing rise, yet their incomes don’t. This imbalance is felt even more acutely in communities of color, where there is a higher likelihood that residents work lower-paying jobs while already struggling with a wide income and wealth gap.

That’s why we were inspired to develop pilot programs in our respective cities, Chicago and Jackson, Mississippi, to explore providing people with a guaranteed income–flexible cash benefits—that allow recipients to choose to pay the expenses that are most important to them. A guaranteed income differs from a universal basic income in that it’s not intended to cover a person’s basic needs, but rather offer a measure of financial stability through a more modest monthly stipend—in many proposals, around $500. While decades of research have proven the benefits of cash transfer programs, new undertakings can provide additional findings, including how such programs can work in the current economic and political environment and how results can be replicated across the country.

We both see it in the communities we live and lead in. Chicago has seen an evaporation of steady jobs that pay the bills and provide basic benefits as unions lose the power to protect workers. In Jackson, the state flag of Mississippi that incorporates the Confederate battle standard still flies over a city that’s more than 80 percent black and yet grapples with entrenched poverty that is easily traced back to slavery.

These communities feel the pressure of trying to make ends meet. Work hours can be erratic and salaries often aren’t enough to make ends meet. The stress of feeding your kids when the electricity bill is overdue means dinner could very well be in the dark. This crippling financial anxiety is felt across the country: 40 percent of Americans had trouble meeting their basic financial needs last year, and the communities we work in are no exception.

Our projects are designed to address these issues. The Jackson project focuses on poor, black moms and began disbursements of $1,000 a month for one year to 16 women just this week. Chicago’s plans and timeline for a pilot are currently being hashed out by a taskforce of economic experts and community leaders, with an end goal of developing a set of recommendations to implement a guaranteed income program for low and middle-income city residents.

The issues we’re aiming to address are unique to each city; but whether it’s a mom struggling to find the cash to buy materials for her daughter’s class project or an urban retail worker facing cuts to his hours at a big box store, the experiences are rooted in a lack of economic stability—the core problem that guaranteed income is designed to solve. It’s not a cure all or substitute for other critical needs such as access to healthcare or affordable housing, but it is a direct and effective way to provide the poor and middle class with a modicum of financial security at a time when Americans have trouble affording their basic needs.

Another related proposal has tremendous potential to reform the tax code to benefit the poor and working class instead of handing over more concessions to the wealthy and corporations. The Economic Security Project, a nonprofit that advocates for the power of cash and also funded the creation of both projects in Chicago and Jackson, developed a Working Families Tax Credit that would give $500 a month to poor and middle-class Americans by closing tax loopholes for the wealthy.

A growing number of leaders are embracing similar tax reform proposals that would ensure the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share, while providing a boost to the poor and middle class. Senator Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, recently introduced legislation to provide the poor and middle class with monthly tax credits that applies to households making less than $100,000. Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, a New Jersey Democrat, has proposed similar legislation to modernize the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a tremendously powerful tool to pull people out of poverty in our cities and across the country. The bills all have an even greater, positive impact on people of color who are more likely to be experiencing poverty.

The energy around the idea of a guaranteed income is strengthening, but there are questions about how this kind of program can work on a larger scale. While philanthropy cannot sustain a guaranteed income pilot in every city that needs one, there are proposals at both the state and federal levels that could play a similar role in alleviating economic instability. Though many of these ideas aren’t formally designated as guaranteed income programs, they share the essential components—cash to those who need it most without strings attached, which offers financial stability and autonomy to recipients and empowers them to make the decisions that are best for them.

The details of these policies differ slightly, but they all share a core intention to reform the tax code to benefit poor and middle-class Americans. Millions of people would thrive under such a measure, and state and national leaders should make these reforms a central component of their legislative agendas. Rational and equitable tax reform to benefit more Americans is good for local communities and the country.

The news that the owner of the Weekly Standard may shut it down highlights how conservative political journalism and media continue to change as a result of one of the most important recent developments in American politics—the collapse of the center-right.

A decade ago, as I recalled in an op-ed in The New York Times in October, prominent commentators confidently asserted that the United States is a “center-right country,” a claim that had some plausibility when George W. Bush was president. But since then, first under Barack Obama and now even more under Donald Trump, the center-right has lost influence nationally and even within the Republican Party, leaving many people with those views politically homeless.

Indeed, as Republicans have moved right, what counts as “center-right” has moved further right too, from the Rockefeller Republicans of a half century ago to the Bush Republicans and now even to many traditional conservatives and neoconservatives who have refused to go along with Trump.

The Weekly Standard has been the foremost intellectual voice of #NeverTrump conservatives, and that appears to be precisely the reason for its troubles today. Founded in 1995 by the neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes and financed originally by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp., the Weekly Standard enjoyed its peak influence during the Bush years.

In 2009, however, two years after buying The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch decided that he no longer needed the Standard and sold it to another right-wing billionaire, Phil Anschutz, who purchased it through one of his firms, the Clarity Media Group, the parent company of the Washington Examiner. But now, like Murdoch before him, Anschutz seems to have decided that the Standard has outlived its political usefulness. In an apparently related development, the Washington Examiner, which has been more supportive of Trump, has announced it is expanding into a national magazine.

The Standard’s problems are not just a matter of being out of sync with the president and therefore with conservative readers. Its difficulties reflect a more general development in conservative media that began before Trump’s election and has intensified since then.

The new book Network Propaganda, by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, helps clarify the shift on the right through two different “maps” of American media and political communication over the period from 2015 to 2018. One map describes the hyperlinking patterns in online media (who links to whom), while the other describes the content sharing practices (liking, sharing, retweeting) of Facebook and Twitter users. The analysis is based on nearly “four million political stories from over 40,000 online news sources.”

One of the findings that emerges from this analysis is that center-right media are a negligible force online:

We find that the influence in the right-wing media ecosystem, whether judged by hyperlinks, Twitter sharing, or Facebook sharing, is both highly skewed to the far right and highly insulated from other segments of the network, from center-right (which is nearly nonexistent) through the far left.

Sites like Fox News and Breitbart, according to Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, not only are the big hubs of right-wing communication; they are also far more prone to rumors and conspiracy theories. The rest of the media—stretching from that “nearly nonexistent” center-right to the left—“operates as an interconnected network anchored by organizations, both for profit and nonprofit, that adhere to professional journalistic norms.”

In other words, center-right media have had the same problem as center-right politicians: They don’t connect to what is now the core of the Republican Party. Since the Weekly Standard has no immediate prospect of recovering the influence it once enjoyed in the White House and elite levels of the Republican Party, it’s easy to see why Anschutz may have decided to cut his losses and place his bet on a publication more likely to resonate with conservatives.

But this also seems like a short-sighted decision. The center-right is down, but it isn’t out. Center-right views are well represented among the more affluent in the United States and especially among the corporate elite. Their influence is sure to be felt in the future.

It’s also short-sighted of liberals and progressives to take any pleasure in the Weekly Standard’s troubles. As Jeet Heer writes at the New Republic, whatever replaces the Standard is likely to be worse.

In a country where we expect power to alternate between the right and left, it’s a dangerous thing when the far right displaces the center-right. You don’t have to be a partisan of the center-right to prefer that it prevail over Trumpism. So when the dust clears, I hope the editors and writers for the Standard find another patron or another platform. I look forward to a time when they and others on the center-right represent the right in the great intellectual and political debates the nation deserves to have.

Workers at the end of the assembly line at General Motors plant in Euclid, Ohio, put finishing touches at the cabs of Fisher Body Metal Station Wagons in 1950.

Much as the presidency of Donald Trump has contributed to the retrospective appreciations of George H.W. Bush, so the conduct of American corporations over the past four decades—not to put too fine a point on it: pocketing revenues for their shareholders while stiffing, if not altogether abandoning, their workers—has cast a rosy glow over the American corporations of the post-World War II era.

One commentator bathed in that glow, based on the evidence of his column Monday in The New York Times is David Leonhardt. His column quite rightly bangs the drum for Elizabeth Warren’s bill to require corporations to set aside 40 percent of their board seats for representatives selected by their workers—a slightly watered-down version of German co-determination, but a significant step forward, if ever enacted, in the battle to make corporations responsible not just to their largest shareholders (among whom are their top executives, who are usually compensated in stock).

Leonhardt correctly notes that it was only in the late 1970s that American corporations began hording their proceeds for their shareholders and managers. For the preceding 30 years, by contrast, workers’ income rose at the identical rate that productivity did and corporations provided health insurance and pensions.

Why was that? According to Leonhardt, that was because “most executives behaved as if they cared about their workers and communities.” He quotes a famous article by Bill Benton of the ad agency Benton and Bowles that appeared in 1944, suggesting that American business had a higher mission than enriching the rich, and suggests that this became a widely accepted viewpoint in corporate boardrooms.

What you won’t find in Leonhardt’s column is any mention of unions, which renders this analysis akin to Hamlet without the prince. The fact that unions represented one-third of the American workforce when Benton penned his piece, and a good deal more than one-third at major corporations, was overwhelmingly the main reason why corporations compensated their workers more fairly then than they have in recent decades. The contract that General Motors signed with the United Auto Workers in 1950, which set the template for the more equitable contracts of that period, came out of GM’s fear that it might have to endure another 100-plus-day shutdown that the UAW had inflicted on the company in its epochal 1946 strike. And as Jack Metzger has documented in his marvelous book Striking Steel, the 1950s were a decade suffused with major strikes as unions successfully fought to thwart corporations’ proposals that would have pared back the wage and benefit gains that workers had made. (Metzger’s book takes its title from the 1959 Steelworker strike against U.S. Steel, when close to half-a-million workers stayed off the job for 116 days, ultimately compelling the company to maintain and even increase its worker benefits.)

So let’s be clear about what the French call les trente glorieuses—the 30 years after World War II when worker income increased and a mass middle class emerged. It wasn’t the Golden Age of Benevolent Corporations. It was the Golden Age of Unions.

After Benjamin Netanyahu returned to Israel from the United States as a young man, he worked for a time as a marketing executive for a furniture company. Around the time he came back to Israel, he also changed his name back to Netanyahu. In the States, he’d rebranded himself as Benjamin Nitay. It was easier for Americans to pronounce.

Marketing and branding were the specialties that Netanyahu brought to his next career, in politics. He treated image-massaging not as a tool, but as a political philosophy.

This week he came a step closer to a possible prison term for that philosophy.

Early on, Netanyahu developed a doctrine that Israel’s poor standing internationally wasn’t caused by its policies. Rather, the problem was a strategic failure to sell itself well to foreign audiences.

Most of all, though, Netanyahu marketed Benjamin Netanyahu. He worked hard on his speaking style, especially in front of television cameras. He learned to insert jokes, to toss in a line about American sports for an American audience, or about his then-toddler son singing a well-known hymn when he appeared before an Orthodox audience during his first run for prime minister. In English, he gave himself a rational, even moderate veneer. In Hebrew, he often rabble-roused.

After he won the premiership, and lost it in 1999, and resurrected himself politically, Netanyahu received two gifts that allowed him to go way beyond creating an image for the media to cover.

The first gift was Israel Hayom, the daily newspaper started by his American casino-mogul backer, Sheldon Adelson in 2007. Whether the paper was Netanyahu’s idea or Adelson’s, the effect is the same: Netanyahu now had a major media operation that existed not to report on him but to advertise him.

Adelson has millions to burn; the paper is given out for free on street corners and is now the largest circulation daily in a country where print on paper is still popular. Last year a freedom-of-information lawsuit by investigative journalist Raviv Drucker forced Netanyahu to release a list of dates and times for his phone calls to Adelson and to the editor of Israel Hayom.He averaged 0.75 calls weekly to Adelson, and 1.5 calls per week to the editor—and as many as five calls a day to the paper’s editor during the last national election campaign. Let’s assume he wasn’t calling to check on soccer scores.

The other gift was technological: the birth of social media. Netanyahu’s Facebook page has 2.3 million followers. Even if a great many of those are foreign fans, it’s likely that the proportion of Israelis reading his posts exceeds the proportion of Americans reading Donald Trump’s tweets. (Netanyahu also has 1.4 million Twitter followers.)

Radio and television were revolutions that allowed leaders to speak, unmediated, to masses. Facebook and Twitter are radio and TV on mega-steroids. Social media allow a leader to speak to followers whenever they want, as often as they want—without reporters giving background or checking facts. Then what the leaders say keeps echoing as the post spreads.

A fine example of Netanyahu’s use of Facebook was his post on election day in 2015, when he warned his followers that “the rule of the right is in danger” because Arab voters were “moving in droves to the polling places.” The post certainly helped him; it may have won him the election.

A great example of the difference between a normal newspaper and one that exists to serve a national leader came this Monday. On the front page of Yediot Aharonot—the country’s second-largest paper—the tabloid headline in red print said, “Bribery,” above a picture of Netanyahu and his wife Sara. Smaller print said that the police have recommended charging both of them in what’s known as Case 4000. The front of the Netanyahu paper Israel Hayomhad three lines of headline: one line on police recommendation, and two lines devoted to him denouncing the police investigation.

The essence of Case 4000: Netanyahu, with the help of officials he appointed, allegedly intervened in regulatory decisions to help Shaul Elovitz, who had the controlling interest in the Bezeq telecom company. In return, Elovitz allegedly allowed Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu to intervene “ flagrantly and continuingly” in the Walla news website that Elovitz also owns. The Netanyahus allegedly meddled in what stories Walla ran and who its editors and reporters were, all to get the flattering coverage they wanted.

Because if there’s one thing better than a news operation that everyone knows is in the palm of your hand, it’s a sycophantic news operation that the public thinks is independent.

For those just tuning in now, the police conclusions in Case 4000 are the sequel to the police statement on Case 1000 and Case 2000 in February. In both those cases, the police also recommended charges against the prime minister. In Case 1000, the Netanyahus allegedly got one million shekels (over a quarter-million dollars) worth of cigars, champagne, and jewelry from two businessmen. One of them, Israeli-born Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, was trying to buy a piece of Israel’s Channel Two TV, which broadcasts the most popular news show in the country. Netanyahu allegedly intervened in regulatory negotiations to help him.

In Case 2000, Netanyahu allegedly offered governmental goodies to the owner of Yediot Aharonot—yes, the other big paper, the independent one—in return for fawning coverage.

These are all still allegations. Israeli prosecutors, headed by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, have to decide if they have a solid enough case to try Netanyahu. If they indict him, it will still have to go to court.

So let’s just say that there’s a very strong suspicion that Netanyahu has turned political marketing into a criminal enterprise. Every politician in a democracy needs to worry about image. For Netanyahu, it appears, his image had become an end in itself, more important than law.

Still, there’s some light in this dark story: Some of the allegations against Netanyahu emerged out of serious investigative journalism. And by trying to corrupt the free press, Netanyahu also provides some lessons about what the free press should be.

The Internet and social media have taught us to expect our news for free, with its quality judged only by clicks and likes. That’s the wrong kind of “free.” One of the jobs of the media is to mediate—to judge the quality of information, to question the politician, to decide what not to cover. To do that costs money. We should be willing to pay. Subscribe or donate to the three or four news sources you respect the most.

But with money and the profit motive come the temptation to pander—to the government or to what the public wants to hear. The crass manipulations alleged committed by Netanyahu and some Israeli media owners are illegal. I don’t think any law can prevent the moral corruption of the media practiced, for instance, by Fox to please Donald Trump and his supporters.

A free press depends on everyone in the news business, journalists but also those on the business side, regarding it as a calling. Netanyahu’s (alleged) determination to subvert that calling is a reminder of how important it is.